


Past Lives

by rosecake



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Crimson Dawn (Star Wars), F/F, Jakku, Manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-24 08:31:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17700974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/pseuds/rosecake
Summary: Qi'ra comes to Jakku looking for a fortune buried in the desert and finds more than she'd anticipated.





	Past Lives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tristesses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/gifts).



The deserts of Jakku wouldn't be so bad if not for the wind. Qi'ra could tolerate the heat, and the frustrating way her feet sunk into the ground with each step, but the wind was something else entirely. Harsh and unpredictable, it whipped up the sand strong enough to scour metal, and that was bad news for her machines.

"How long before they're working again?" asked Qi'ra. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the wind.

Ackma shrugged. "It depends on how long it takes the wind to die down, and if we have enough time to clean the sand out of the gears before it starts back up again."

Ackma was the best excavation expert in the Crimson Dawn and had been a useful asset before on all sorts of scavenging operations and illegal archaeological digs. She was a little older than Qi'ra, and had worked for Maul raiding all sorts of ancient Sith temples and tombs long before Qi'ra ever met him. But even with all her experience the desert was proving difficult.

Qi'ra hadn't expected anything different. Neither the New Republic nor the seething remnants of the Empire had ever put any real effort into recovering wreckage from the battle site for a reason. Even so, the constant setbacks still irritated her. Her dress was plastered to her skin with sweat, and her skin felt raw even though she was covered head to toe to protect herself rom the sand. Every time she blinked she could feel grit in her eyes even though her goggles were on so tight they dug into her skin.

"You can always wait on the ship, ma'am," said Ackma. The wind had risen to a howl, and she was practically shouting to make herself heard over it. "We can handle things down here."

"I'm fine," said Qi'ra, running a hand over the still machinery. "I'll stay down here until we've found what we're looking for."

Ackma looked a bit taken aback, which wasn't that surprising. Ordinarily Qi'ra wouldn't bother involving herself so deeply in what was really at most a side project. Her original plan had been to leave Ackma alone to her work once things were set up. Some of the ships that had gone down in the desert had left large pieces intact, and some of those ships were rumored to have had experimental weapons on board. But rumors weren't the same things as facts, and even if the ships had been carrying anything of value there wasn't any guarantee that any of it had survived both the fall and decades under the sand dunes. 

Still, she was certain they were going to find something.

Qi'ra wasn't force sensitive. All the training in the galaxy couldn't give her the ability to move things with her mind, and she couldn't see the future. She was alive, though, and the Force moved through all living things whether they were sensitive to it or not. Anyone could, in time, make themselves aware of that flow. Her time serving under Maul had taught her that.

And in the harsh, dead landscape of Jakku, buried under the discordant howl of the desert wind, something powerful was calling out to her.

\---

Nothing about Jakku was hospitable to life, but all across the galaxy life had a way of blooming in even the unlikeliest of places. The small, scattered population of the planet tended to congregate in small settlements anywhere there was both water and some sort of natural barrier to the worst of the sandstorms. Niima Outpost had neither of those things, which made its continued existence something of a miracle. It had been chosen solely for its location right in the center of the Starship Graveyard. For a while the Hutts in charge of the place had turned a decent profit scavenging, mostly because turning a profit was easy when you didn't have to pay your people more than a handful of rations a day.

But it hadn't taken long before all the easily accessible wreckage was picked clean, and as the years went by the outpost got smaller and smaller as people either left to find easier work or died in the desert. The place was still nominally Hutt territory, but they didn't bother to actively administrate it much anymore. Now it was just Unkar Plutt, content to be the big fish in a pond so small it was nearly non-existent.

He didn't have nearly the kind of clout it would take to stand up to the Crimson Dawn, so instead he handled Qi'ra's presence by ignoring her entirely. She set up her own tents and spread word around that she was looking for scavenged ship parts - computer drives, mostly, but she made offers on nearly everything, even the junk she had no use for. She wanted to draw people to her.

Rey was the first human to approach Qi'ra. There weren't a lot of humans left in Niima - other species needed less water, and were more likely to survive the conditions. She was a bit thin, and her skin was scrapped raw in spots, especially around her hands, but other than that she looked to be in relatively good health. Some of the people Qi'ra had seen around looked like they already had a foot in the grave.

"They said you're offering credits for computers off the old Imperial ships?" asked Rey. She sounded suspicious, like the offer was too good to be true.

"Imperial or Alliance, I'm not concerned about affiliation so long as it's from the final battle," said Qi'ra. "And I'll pay in credits or rations, whichever you prefer."

Rey hesitated for a moment, then placed a fractured hard disk on the table between them. "I pulled this out of the wreckage of Star Destroyer."

Qi'ra looked it over with her scanner. She could probably still pull data off it, but it looked like it had come from a nav computer, and she was looking for information a little more valuable than outdated starcharts.

But she wasn't as interested in military secrets now as when she'd first arrived. Ackma would either manage to dig up lost research worth having or she wouldn't. Qi'ra was more interested in the people now. That steady hum in the Force was still there in the back of her mind, and it was coming from something alive.

"I'll give you fifty credits for it," she said, watching as Rey's eyes widened. It had been a lifetime since Qi'ra had last considered fifty credits to be a lot of money, but she'd never forget what it was like. "Or ten of those polystarch rations they use here. Whichever you'd prefer."

"Rations," said Rey, automatically, and then Qi'ra could see her stop and consider the question more carefully. "Yes, the rations."

Qi'ra reached into the basket by her desk and counted them out. She probably would've taken the rations too if she were in Rey's position. In a place like this there was no guarantee there'd always be enough food around to actually spend the credits on.

"If you have anything else, I'd be interested in that too," said Qi'ra.

Rey nodded, and then she was gone. 

\---

Unkar Plutt clearly didn't appreciate Qi'ra's presence. He was afraid of her, so he didn't say anything directly to her face, but he complained very loudly to himself whenever she was in earshot. He probably kept himself up all night worrying she'd try to take his territory from him, but he was delusional if he thought his little operation on Niima Outpost was worth taking.

Qi'ra didn't bother going out of her way to reassure him, though. She didn't like him much, and it suited it her fine to let him worry as she pried around his offices.

She wasn't sure what she was hoping to find. She'd heard all sorts of local stories since she got here, many of them directly from Unkar, and none of them had been very interesting. Nobody stood out much, nobody did much of anything. The Jedi were long gone, and even if they were still around Qi'ra doubted they would have bothered sending anyone to test levels on a nearly lifeless rock like this. Nothing pointed to any kind of force connection.

"Were does Rey live?" she asked.

"Not here in the outpost," said Unkar. "She's a weird little loner. Lives by herself out in the desert. Not sure where, exactly."

"It doesn't sound as if you like her much," said Qi'ra. She probably ought to count that as a mark in Rey's favor.

Unkar shrugged. "Why should I care either way. She's a good scavenger. Always managing to find things that still work somehow. But she gets pushy about the rations."

Not pushy enough, probably.  But Qi'ra filed the information away in the back of her mind. 

\---

 "I brought more harddisks," said Rey.

They clattered across Qi'ra's desk as she emptied her bag. All told she had a few dozen, holostorage drives and magnet tapes and what looked like a fairly intact nav computer.

"You managed to find all this in a week?" she asked, sifting through them. The nav computer started leaking sand across her palm when she picked it up, so it probably wasn't as intact as it looked.

"Unkar doesn't really go for stuff like this. He mostly wants working machinery parts he can use for the stuff in his shipyard. Some of it I've had lying around for a while."

She brought one to see what kind of offers Qi'ra was making, and then brought the rest when she knew she'd get a good deal. Clever.

"It'll take me a while to sort through them and come up with an offer," said Qi'ra.

She slipped her hand into her bag and pulled out a lightsaber, an old relic leftover from Maul's collection. It wasn't his own - that had been lost with him, presumably - just one that he'd taken at some point. It didn't really matter whose it was, though. Only that it had at some point belonged to a force user.

She held it out to Rey. "In the meantime, have you seen anything like this?" she asked.

Qi'ra had no idea if Rey recognized it for what it was, but she hesitated for a second before taking it. Nothing happened that Qi'ra could see, or that she could feel. Rey only looked blankly at it for a second before suddenly dropping it back on Qi'ra's desk.

She left, nearly tripping over herself in her effort to get out of the tent, not bothering to collect her scavenged junk or even ask for her payment. She left her own bag, too, and the staff she carried with her.

Qi'ra let her run. She'd clearly be back.

\---

"What was that," asked Rey, pointing suspiciously at Qi'ra's desk even though the lightsaber had been put away ages ago. No greeting, no request for any of her stuff back. Just an accusatory question.

"A lightsaber hilt," said Qi'ra. "It used to belong to a Jedi, probably around fifty years ago, although I'm not sure of its exact provenance."

"You don't know who it belonged to?" asked Rey. She sounded disappointed.

"No," said Qi'ra. "Why do you ask?"

Rey's gaze was unfocused as she stared at Qi'ra's desk, clearly seeing something that wasn't there. "I think I saw him," said Rey, quietly. "When I touched it, I think - I think it was when he died. He was fighting with another man, and the other man was stronger."

Qi'ra leaned back in her chair, her hands settled in her lap. She could feel the Force flowing through her, thrumming in the presence of a light much stronger than her own. "Did you see anything else?"

Rey shook her head. "No. Is that- normal? Have you seen the same thing?"

"No, I've never seen or felt anything from it," said Qi'ra. She reaching into one of the cabinets for the lightsaber and let it rest on the table in front of her. Rey leaned back a little, like she was afraid of it. "Only people who are force sensitive have that kind of reaction."

"Force sensitive?" asked Rey, her apprehension quickly replaced with skepticism.

Qi'ra shrugged. "You could also be crazy. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference."

Rey frowned, and hesitantly reached out to touch the light saber again. She tapped it quickly, pulling her hand away as if it might jump up and bite her, and only reached out to fully grasp it again when nothing happened.

"Why bother coming to Jakku?" asked Rey, turning the lightsaber over in her hands. "There's nothing here."

"I'm sure Jakku has its treasures. They're just so deeply buried in the sand that they're hard to find."

"Well, I've been scavenging here my whole life and I've never seen anything like this," said Rey. "Really, there's nothing here but worthless junk."

"I've heard you're very good at managing to find things that still work out there."

Rey flushed. "It's only ever enough to scrap by."

That was impressive in and of itself. Qi'ra had gone through Niima Outpost's meager records, and as sloppy as they were it was still clear the population was dwindling. Too many people had failed to find enough to scrap by, and the death toll got a little higher every year.

"Who taught you how to scavenge?" asked Qi'ra. "Who taught you how to navigate the desert, how to figure out which things were worth taking and which ones were useless?"

"I taught myself," said Rey. She seemed surprised by the question, like the answer should have been obvious.

"Not your parents?"

"No," said Rey, and by the look on her face she didn't want to talk about it anymore.

Qi'ra let the silence drag on for a while before she spoke. "Most force users had mentoring traditions," she said. "Masters and apprentices, or similar setups with different names, but they're all gone now. My predecessor was trained as a Sith, though, and even though I'm not sensitive he still taught me some of what he knew. Things that I can teach you."

Rey looked at her curiously. "You're staying here on Jakku?"

"No," said Qi'ra. The place was only tolerable because she knew her stay was temporary. It might be a little more pleasant than the sewers on Corellia, but that was a low bar to clear, and Qi'ra hadn't worked so hard for so long to spend old age in squalor. Too long here and she was sure the sand would wear her down. "I would have you come with me."

"No, thank you," said Rey, and Qi'ra was a little taken aback at the speed and firmness of the rejection. "This place is my home. I can't leave it."

"What kind of home is Jakku to you?" asked Qi'ra. "You have no family here. You said yourself that there was _nothing_ here."

Rey opened her mouth as if to protest, and then she closed it. She gathered her things quickly and then stood to leave.

"You wouldn't understand," she said.

\---

 

Unkar Plutt's office was a mess and his security was so bad it was an insult. How he hadn't been robbed blind yet was a mystery, but then again, fear was an excellent deterrent. He might not be much but he was the uncontested tyrant of this little place.  It hadn't been any different with Lady Proxima. When Qi'ra was young it had felt like the Worms ran the galaxy, but now that she was older she knew better what a pathetically small piece of it they'd held.

The protections on Unkar's computers were rudimentary, and that was being generous. The Crimson Dawn had a number of code breakers and hackers on the payroll, and she could have called one to break into them from the ship if she needed to, but it was simple enough to just do it herself.

His computer files were as much of a mess as everything else, with no organization she could identify, but fortunately for her he made up for it by hoarding records and documentation of every deal he'd ever made. It took her a little while to find what she was looking for; slavery was, of course, illegal in the Republic, so people always called it something else. Indentured servitude was always a popular cover, but Unkar had instead called the transaction a loan to Rey's parents. There was no mention in the document itself that the collateral for the loan wasn't credits or goods, but a human child.

After the Empire fell inflation skyrocketed, and the value of credits had fluctuated wildly ever since. She went through the math in her head for a minute or two, and eventually decided that Rey had sold for probably about a tenth of what Proxima had gotten out of Dryden for Qi'ra. The galaxy was full of people who had no real understanding of the value of the things they bought and sold.

She switched the computer off and left, happy to put the squalor of Unkar's wretched offices behind her.

\---

It didn't take Qi'ra long to find the piece of wreckage Rey called a home.

It was small and thoroughly worn down by the elements, and it didn't look particularly clean either, but Unkar didn't seem sure of where exactly it was and there a lot of value in that kind of privacy. It was safer.

Qi'ra knocked on the hatch, and Rey scowled at her when she opened it. "How did you find me?"

"I just wandered around until I found you. I guess I got lucky," said Qi'ra, shrugging. The truth was she'd dropped a tracker in Rey's bag, but she didn't plan on mentioning that.

"I'm not leaving Jakku," said Rey, but even though her tone was brusque she left the hatch open so Qi'ra could follow her in.

There wasn't much room in the little shelter. Qi'ra went ahead and sat down cross-legged on the floor without being invited to, mostly because if she kept standing she was likely to hit her head on something.

"How long have you lived here?" asked Qi'ra.

"I'm not sure exactly. Twenty years, probably."

Qi'ra looked around the room. Two decades and most of her youth wasted. At this point dragging her off the planet in cuffs would be doing her a favor, but trying something like that with a force sensitive was a disaster waiting to happen. They could be dangerously unpredictable under stress. The power in them was too explosive, too hard to control, especially when they were emotional. If Rey was going to be of any use to Qi'ra she'd need to come of her own free will.

"Twenty years of waiting." Qi'ra said it lightly, no accusation in her voice, but it riled Rey up anyway.

"I'm not leaving," said Rey, her voice uneven, angry and sad at the same time. Deep down she must have realized already what a pointless existence she was living, otherwise she wouldn't be so defensive.

"You're not a child anymore, Rey," said Qi'ra. "You don't have to wait for your family to come find you. You can start looking for them."

Rey looked at her, suspicion in her gaze. "You're saying you'll help me look for my parents?"

"I have resources you can't imagine. More than you'll ever find here on Jakku."

Rey's face was so open, so expressive, and one day Qi'ra would have to teach her to keep it under control. She was clearly considering the offer, but the suspicion hadn't left her. "What's in it for you?"

It was sometimes hard to lie to force sensitives. Maybe Rey could read her intentions, or maybe she couldn't, but it either way it was almost always easier to go with some version of the truth. "You remind me of myself when I was younger," said Qi'ra.

Rey's expression softened, and Qi'ra knew she'd be leaving Jakku with her.

\---

When Qi'ra first set foot on Dryden's yacht it was the most luxurious thing she'd ever seen. She'd been angry at the time, though, and determined to seem more worldly than she actually was, so she'd done her best to act thoroughly unimpressed. But it was Qi'ra's ship now, and Rey had no such hang-ups. She stared at everything in open-mouthed wonder.

"Everything's so clean," she said, running her hand along the paneling in the hall.

"I've lived on this ship since I first joined the Crimson Dawn," said Qi'ra. "I try to keep it in good shape." There were larger ships in her fleet, and newer and pricier ones, but the _First Light_ would be her flagship until she died.

"You don't have a family name either, do you?" said Rey, looking at her with a contemplative expression. "Just Qi'ra of the Crimson Dawn."

And before that she'd been Qi'ra of the White Worms, but anyone who'd call her that was either dead or so long gone from her life they were best forgotten. Neither Proxima's gang nor Maul's syndicate had been much substitute for a family, but at least the Crimson Dawn she could call her own now.

"That's right," said Qi'ra. "I didn't have any family growing up either."

"Did they leave you with the Crimson Dawn?" she asked. Her voice was hesitant, like she knew her questions might be getting too personal but she couldn't stop herself from asking anyway. 

"They left me alone," said Qi'ra. "I was around your age by the time I made it to the Crimson Dawn."

They walked the halls in silence for a while. "Do you know why they left you?" asked Rey.

"I'm not sure," said Qi'ra. "Maybe they had some reason for abandoning me, but I think it's more likely they just died."

"Doesn't it bother you, not knowing?" asked Rey. She'd stopped walking, and Qi'ra had to turn back to face her.

"Not anymore, not really," said Qi'ra. It was mostly true. She used to think about them all the time as a child, spent hours fantasizing about them finding her and saving her from the White Worms, but there was only so long Qi'ra could dream about things that never came true before the dreams started to hurt. She still thought about them, but by now it was more of a passing curiosity; she just wonders what happened, like she might wonder what really happened to the lost temple of Con'trin, or who'd ordered the assassination of the last Queen of Ronso. It didn't feel personal.  It was just one of those mysteries that happened in life. 

"How did you stop?" asked Rey, and she wasn't crying but Qi'ra could tell by her voice that she might start any second. Qi'ra reached for her shoulder, but Rey turned and started walking again.

"I don't really know," said Qi'ra, following. It wasn't a very useful answer, but by now she knew Rey well enough to know that they were very different people. Rey's feelings were always going to be closer to the surface. Maybe it was part of being force sensitive, or maybe it was just something inherent to they way she structured. "Eventually I realized I was just hurting myself by holding out hope, and I let it go."

Rey nodded as if she understood, but Qi'ra knew that she didn't.

\---

It was hard to tell what she was looking at, as shattered and worn down as the pieces of it were, but she could still make out the shape and form of some sort of engine laid out across her holding deck.

"I talked to the engineers and I'm pretty sure this is how everything we recovered originally fit together," said Ackma.

"So they don't think it was a new type of gun?"

Ackma shook her head. "No, they think it was a prototype shield. The Imps managed to run the Death Stars on kyber, and it looks like they were trying to scale it down to use it to power lasers and shields on their destroyers. We didn't find any guns, though, just this thing."

Qi'ra crouched down to get a better look at the kyber crystal they'd found at the heart of the wreckage. It was so shattered and blackened from the ship's destruction she wouldn't have known it was kyber if it hadn't been tested. "Do the engineers think it was actually working during the battle?"

"They're not sure," said Ackma, shrugging. "We found the ship in a million pieces, though, so I'm guessing it didn't work as well as they'd hoped."

It was hard to believe a piece of crystal no bigger than what you'd find in a lightsaber could help power a ship the size of a Star Destroyer, but it was also hard to believe the Imperials had built a single laser large enough to take out an entire planet. The galaxy was full of strange things.

And while she didn't have the resources to try and reverse-engineer the wreckage into working technology, she knew people did, people who would pay a small fortune for the opportunity to do so.

"I thought you might be more interested in this," said Ackma, handing her a datapad. "We recovered it from some drives we found."

It was a list of codes, followed by a list of locations, and it took her a second to realize what she was looking at. "They were tracking the sourcing of their kyber?" she asked, and Ackma nodded.

Jedha, which had already been so thoroughly strip-mined there nothing but the crust of the planet left. Ilum and Lothal, which were only barely in better shape than Jedha. Christophsis, which was currently the source of a conflict between the New Republic and some lingering Imperial factions, a conflict that she didn't have the firepower to get involved in.

And Amer, Lythen, and Kore-9, three places that were apparently worth looking into.

The New Republic was built on unstable ground. That didn't bother Qi'ra - her business had flourished in the chaos left behind after the Empire fell, and would continue on whether the New Republic did or not. A new war was coming, sooner or later, and if it was going to be fought with kyber, then she wanted her own supply of it.

Coaxium had made her several fortunes over her life, but it never hurt to diversify.

\---

Training Rey went slowly. Qi'ra had no force powers of her own, and that made it difficult to teach someone who did. Normal weapons, sure, Qi'ra could teach her how to use those, but Rey was already as good with the staff as anyone. The lightsaber was something completely different.

"This isn't actually possible," said Rey.

"I know it's possible, I've seen it done," replied Qi'ra, and she raised the blaster again. It was too low-powered to do any permanent damage but it still stung, and so far Rey had failed to deflect a single blast. Qi'ra fired again, and Rey brought the lightsaber up just a second too late to stop it from striking her arm.

"Blast it," she said, rubbing her arm.

"You're getting better," said Qi'ra. She meant it, too - wild swings were starting to develop into purposeful motion, even if Rey wasn't ready to handle a fight with anyone who had a real blaster.

Rey flushed. "I don't really see the point in this," said Rey. She sounded torn between being pleased with the compliment and upset with being shot.

"It's a dangerous galaxy out there and it's getting worse every day," said Qi'ra. "You need to be able to protect yourself."

And Qi'ra wasn't getting any younger, so ideally she'd be able to use Rey to protect herself as well. It wasn't Rey's physical strength that was the problem - it was her personality. Maul's techniques, or what Qi'ra understood of them, were based in anger and rage so strong they slipped into hatred. And Rey simply wasn't that prone to hatred. Frustration, yes, she had that in spades, but that kind of anger didn't compare to the rage it took to fuel force lightning or break apart ships.

That might change, though. Rey still asked about her parents every day, and eventually Qi'ra would need to handle that.

For the moment, though, she pulled out her medkit and sifted through it until she found a cooling patch for Rey's arm.

Rey sighed as Qi'ra pressed the patch down on her arm. "Thank you," she said, taking the pack in her own hand so she could hold it in place herself. "It's fine, really. I'm sorry I was complaining."

She reacted so strongly to even the slightest bit of kindness. It was almost enough to make Qi'ra feel guilty.

\---

If Qi'ra were a kinder person then perhaps she could have found a way to tell Rey the truth about her parents in a way that wouldn't hurt her. Maybe she could have found a way to soften the blow. But in her defense, there really wasn't any way to tell a person they'd been sold by their own parents for about a week's worth of drinking money that would somehow make it easy to take.

It was going to be painful, and at the moment Qi'ra's main concern was making sure that Rey didn't see her as the source of that pain. So she kept what she knew to herself, and gently guided Rey back in the direction of Jakku.

Rey would have to figure out the truth for herself.

\---

 

Rey stepped back onto the _First Light_ shaking. There was blood on her clothes and her eyes were red and swollen, and Qi'ra suspected the only reason she wasn't crying was because she'd already cried herself out.

"I killed-" said Rey, and of course it wasn't just about finding out what had happened to her parents. It was also about finding out what she was capable of in her anger. "I killed-" she said again, her voice catching before she could finish her sentence.

"It's fine," said Qi'ra, gently pulling her close, and for once Rey didn't stiffen up or pull away. She collapsed in Qi'ra's arms, her chest heaving as she dry sobbed.

"You're going to be fine," she said, rubbing Rey's back as she shook. "It all gets easier with time."

She spoke softly, calmly. She really didn't care who Rey had killed. Unkar was a safe bet, but judging by the shape Rey was currently in she probably hadn't stopped there. Maybe she'd put Niima Outpost out if its misery altogether.

Qi'ra wasn't going to judge her for it. She'd killed more people than Rey had ever met, and most of those murders had been committed with cold and rational intention. 

She didn't let it bother her anymore. It really did all get easier with time.

\---

Rey refused to talk about it for ages. Qi'ra wasn't sure if she'd ever find out exactly how much damage Rey had done in her anger.

"Did you ever go back?" asked Rey. It was morning, and they both had things they should be doing, but Rey had wanted to stay in bed and Qi'ra had felt indulgent. Rey didn't want to talk about Jakku, or couldn't, so she'd opened up to physical comfort instead.

Qi'ra wasn't bothered by it in the slightest. She liked it too much to want to discourage it. "To Corellia?"

"Yes."

"Not for a very long time. Not until the Crimson Dawn was fully mine," said Qi'ra. Rey was curled up with her back to her, and she leaned forward to press her face to Rey's hair. "I didn't want to go back as somebody's servant. I didn't want to go back at all, not really, but I couldn't stop thinking about it."

Rey rolled around so that she was facing Qi'ra. "What did you do?" she asked.

"I cleaned the whole place out," said Qi'ra. The worms, their dogs, the humans. She'd been indiscriminate, except in that she'd made sure to kill Proxima last. Qi'ra had wanted her to see her kingdom laid to waste, as small and pathetic as it was.

"Did it make you feel better?"

"No," said Qi'ra. Proxima had been so old and weak it had almost seemed like a mercy killing. "Not really. I should have left it alone."

"You think it would have been better that way?"

Qi'ra sighed and ran her fingers through Rey's hair. "The past is what it is, there's no making it better. You need to learn to leave it behind you. Focus on what you want for your future instead."

That was the one good thing about coming up from nothing. The future had to be better; it couldn't possibly be worse.

\---

 

The training went faster after Rey's attack on Niima, and it wasn't long before Qi'ra had taught Rey everything she new about the Sith. The Sith probably weren't the best role models, not for a person like Rey, it was just that Qi'ra didn't know much about any other type of force user. She'd come across a few things, mostly in the context of selling stolen antiquities, but Palpatine had been chillingly thorough in eradicating any trace of the Force outside of himself. 

"I heard Luke Skywalker tried to start a school," said Rey, flipping through an ancient book Maul had looted from a temple decades ago. "Did you hear about it?"

"I only heard about it when it went up in flames," said Qi'ra. The Jedi had been around for millennia, but across her lifetime she'd watched everyone who tried to harness the Force too tightly end up destroying themselves. It sometimes made her nervous for Rey.

But strength was still preferable to weakness, even if it had its own risks. At least Rey might be able to burn out on her own terms.

"Maybe the Force doesn't want the Jedi back," said Rey. She wasn't holding the book with her hands; she was balancing it above her lap with her mind, an exercise in precision. She was good at using the force in quick, violent bursts while fighting, but deliberate, careful actions were still tricky.

"Maybe so," said Qi'ra. It was difficult to imagine Rey as a full-fledged Sith instead, but the Force didn't seem to want them back any more than it wanted the Jedi. Or maybe it was just that Qi'ra had grown too soft in her old age, too reluctant to push Rey in the ways she needed to be pushed in order to be stronger.

Hopefully she wouldn't need to be ruthless in the same ways that Qi'ra had. The Force was strong in her, and perhaps with that kind of raw power Rey could afford some mercy.

Rey closed the book without touching it, and let it slid neatly back into place on the bookshelf. She was getting better with it every day. "Are you done with work?"

"Yes," said Qi'ra, closing out the files on her datapad. Several accounts still needed reviewing, but it could wait a while. The business side of things mostly ran itself these days. Operations needed a firmer hand, but even so, she didn't need to commit her every waking second to work.

It had been a while since Qi'ra had put much thought into what would happen to the syndicate after she died. It was her shield and her source of strength; she kept it running and powerful to protect herself, and she had never cared what would happen to it once she was no longer around to need protection. She had no family name to pass down, and she'd never cared much about the idea of a legacy. Someone would either rise up to take her place or the syndicate would collapse into a power vacuum - once she was dead it wouldn't matter to her either way.

Recently, though, her thinking had changed.

Rey rested her hand on Qi'ra's back as they walked the halls back to their room. "We should visit Kore-9 soon," said Qi'ra. "We found a line of kyber there, and they've started mining. You could find a crystal and build your own lightsaber."  Something Rey'd chosen for herself would probably work better than one of Maul's relics, and either way, Kore-9 was going to be very important to the syndicate in the coming years. Rey should get familiar with it.

"I'd like that," said Rey. "I was already thinking about trying to build a hilt from scratch, it doesn't seem very complicated."

Perhaps Qi'ra was starting to care about what would happen to the syndicate after all. Crimson Dawn had started with a Sith; perhaps it was fate that it end up back in a force user's hands.

She was just grateful that she'd found someone worth leaving it to.


End file.
